Maitland Well May Be Done By June

May 19, 1985|By Jonathan Susskind of The Sentinel Staff

MAITLAND — Purity tests on water from the city's new Keller Road well field are scheduled to begin Monday, and if all goes smoothly the water could start flowing in early June, said Maitland's public works director.

The 1,100-foot well with a 4,000-gallons-per-minute pump will increase the water supply by about 80 percent, Matt Cross said Thursday.

Delayed more than 11 months past its original completion date by slow equipment delivery and the need to drill the well deeper than anticipated, the water plant also will cost triple its expected price.

City Manager George McMahon said he does not believe the city will recover the plant's $1.5 million expense with connection fees soon but Cross said he is not so pessimistic.

Cross said he thinks people will find out the plant was a worthwhile investment because it can serve residential areas east of Interstate 4 as well as hundreds of acres west of I-4.

At one time Cross calculated that connection fees would repay the cost of the plant in five to seven years. He now said it probably will take longer but he said all the money eventually will be paid back to the city.

Maitland was forced to build the plant when Orange County told the city in 1983 that it did not want to provide water service in the Maitland Center area.

City officials were displeased to learn shortly after deciding to build the Keller Road plant that Orange County was planning to expand its Riverside water plant off Forest City Road to increase service in the area the county had said it did not want to serve.

Meanwhile, Maitland sunk a well 1,133 feet deep and built a new pump and tank at the existing Wymore Road water plant and bored a line under I-4 to serve the west I-4 developments until the Keller Road plant opened.

Built on 2 1/2 acres of city land, the Keller Road well field, pump, treatment plant and storage tank will operate Monday for chlorination and testing only, Cross said.

For the next three weeks operators will keep pumping water into the 750,000-gallon tank, testing it and disposing it. ''The time-consuming part is going to be the sterilization'' of the system, he said. Only when tests come out 100 percent positive -- with no sediment, germs or excessive chemicals -- will the plant get state and county approval to start pumping into the waterline network, Cross said.

With the addition of the Keller Road well, Maitland will have seven operating wells able to pump an average of 9,200 gallons a minute, or almost 13.3 million gallons a day. The new plant site has enough room for development of a second well and storage tank and two more pumps, Cross said.